


love, improvised

by slightlied



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Music, M/M, [looks at my own repertoire of sheet music], [looks at my saved youtube links], nOt tHaT THat's a bAD thInG, so uhhhh there's gonna be a lot of chopin, —things super extra classical composer victor says probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-05 19:26:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11584620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlied/pseuds/slightlied
Summary: Victor has no idea who the beautiful boy is, but he’s definitely fucking up Chopin, in the worst possible way there is to fuck up Chopin.Victor would be pissed if he wasn’t so damn turned on.---or, super extra classical composer victor and jazz composer yuuri





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> part of the justine moves her tumblr writing to ao3 dump / from [this au](https://forovnix.tumblr.com/post/158222774986/also-viktor-as-the-very-very-extra-classical) prompted by lily_winterwood
> 
> thank you for reading! :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> music:  
> yuuri's playing [this jazz arrangement](https://youtu.be/R6Zc2vKBF-4) of chopin's etude op. 10 no. 12  
> victor plays chopin's [waltz op. 64 no. 2](https://youtu.be/WVsGf1ag6Us)

Victor has no idea who the beautiful boy is, but he’s definitely fucking up Chopin, in the worst possible way there is to fuck up Chopin.

He sits onstage in a suit two sizes too big for him, bathing in the shitty dim stage lights of this poet’s café, and the piano is a Fazioli, of all contraptions.

And yet.

This is the most beautiful thing he has ever experienced, Victor thinks. Never mind the travesty that has been made out of the étude. Chopin’s emotional tribute to the Polish uprising against Russia, reduced to the musical imagery of a late-night bebop. Victor would be pissed if he wasn’t so damn turned on.

He watches the pianist move with the music; lean into the runs that descend like cascades, tap his feet to the rhythm of the bass, crouch down when the melody turns soft and  _pianissimo_. The crowd is absolutely eating it up, going wild whenever the piece wrenches away from its intended classical melody and twists into jazz. Despite himself, Victor grins from his seat at the bar. Knocks his knuckles against the tabletop in time with the ground beat.

When the performance is over, the pianist bows to roars of applause. It’s by some extraordinary stroke of luck that he makes his way over to the bar and decides to take the empty seat next to Victor.

“I gotta start paying you for all the business you bring me,” the bartender says. She smiles wryly, drying off a tray of glasses with a damp towel.

The pianist blushes. “You know there’s no need for that, Minako-sensei.”

Minako tsks, mutters something that sounds like, “Too good to me,” under her breath before slamming down a shot glass and pouring amber liquid into it. “On the house,” she tells him.

The pianist laughs quietly and thanks her. He throws back the shot with ease, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. Small beads of sweat cover his forehead, either from the exertion of his performance or the heat of the stage lights, Victor doesn’t know.

Victor doesn’t care, really.

When the pianist sets the glass back down, he startles to see Victor staring at him. Busted.

But Victor doesn’t care about that, either.

“Can I help you?” the pianist asks, surprised.

 _Yes_ , Victor wants to say.  _Can I have your name? Your number? A date? Those fingers, grabbing at my hair and digging into my scalp?_

Victor says none of those things.

Victor was never good with words.

“No, but I can help you,” he tells him instead. “What’s your name?”

The pianist blinks at him, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Um. Yuuri.” He hesitates before asking, “How are you going to help me?”

Victor drums his fingers on the table. “Your Chopin. Atrocious.”

“Excuse me?”

“Absolutely atrocious,” Victor continues, ignoring Christophe’s voice in his head telling him, _shut the fuck up right now, this is not how you get laid._ “You need all the help that you can get.”

“Really?” Yuuri’s eyes are twinkling, a hint of a smile playing at his lips. Victor is so fucking gone for this guy and he has no idea where to go from here.

So he just repeats, “Really. Yeah.”

“You do know that’s not the point, right?” the pianist says.

Victor scoffs. “Jazz pianists.”

Yuuri straight-up giggles at that, dangerous breathy laughs that make Victor’s stomach clench.

And later when the bar’s closing down and the chairs are being put up, Victor leads them to the piano—not without lamenting its manufacturer and without the man rolling his eyes at him, “Just play, Victor,”—and so he does. And if Yuuri’s Chopin was an act of seduction, then Victor’s Chopin is a declaration of love, and maybe he’s gone too serious too quickly, but Victor stopped caring about anything the moment Yuuri made music sound so  _new_  to him after months of feeling stuck and  _bored_  and  _old_.

“Okay,” Yuuri says, long after the last note dies out. Victor never asked a question, but Yuuri coughs and again he says, “Okay, yeah.”

“Okay,” Victor echoes. His fingers dart forward to lace their hands together. 

(“Jazz pianist,” Christophe says later over the phone. “A  _jazz_  pianist? Victor Nikiforov,  _really_?” 

Victor doesn’t even try to hide the smile in his voice. “Really. Yeah.”) 


	2. Chapter 2

Victor’s not going to pretend that jazz has suddenly solved all of his problems. He’s not _that_ much of a white male lead in an adapted-for-film musical. (No matter what Yuri Plisetsky tells him.) 

Victor’s not going to pretend that Yuuri has solved all of his problems, either. In fact, if he thinks really hard about it, Yuuri has possibly created more problems for him. 

“But that’s what love does to you, I guess,” Victor says dramatically. “So, fine. All yours.” 

He dutifully moves off the piano bench as Yuuri rolls his eyes at him. “It is my piano,” he points out. He takes the seat Victor vacated and Victor watches him with a cheek turned into his palm, elbow resting on the shelf of the grand piano. 

“Don’t call a Fazioli your baby,” Victor tells him with mock horror. 

“What is _with_ you and Faziolis?” Yuuri rolls his eyes again and starts to warm up his fingers on the keys. _His_ version of warming up, anyway, where he runs over botched scales but does it in a syncopated beat so that it still sounds more like music and less like noise. 

Only just. 

Victor tried to teach him how to do it properly the other night. “See this, yeah? This is basic.” He demonstrated a simple five-finger pattern. “And then you just move up to the next key and keep going until you hit the tonic again.” 

Yuuri only looked amused. “I know what the Hanon technique is.” 

Victor blinked at him. “So you _are_ civilized.” 

“ _I_ am advanced civilization,” Yuuri had said, sliding up next to Victor and pressing their thighs together. He tugged Victor’s hands off the piano and stroked a finger down the inside of Victor’s wrist. Confident brown eyes met surprised blue ones as Yuuri knocked their foreheads together. “And _you’re_ stuck in the Stone Age.” 

And then he was gone, lightning fast, inching away to the other end of the piano to start dabbling through some scales. There’s a light blush across his cheeks, maybe, but it’s hard to tell from this angle, and anyway it might be Victor’s sudden lightheadedness playing tricks on his vision. He registers, faintly, the slight form of mockery in Yuuri playing the same pattern Victor had shown him but with added unnecessary trills. 

This is his life now, Victor realizes. He’s made his bed, and it is a too-bright music scale being played on a too-bright Fazioli and Victor is—he is not completely upset about it, is the thing. You can’t control the faults of your loved ones. Victor sometimes doesn’t bother to use turn signals when he drives, and merges lanes without warning. Yuuri has shit taste in pianos. Relationships are an exercise in tolerance and forgiveness.

Victor should be feeling a bit more offended, though—this is _his life’s work_ —but this is Yuuri’s, too, and Victor will endure a few grating inverted scales for him. He’ll endure those and then some, because the problem is this: Victor should be writing music. Or rather, Victor should be writing _his_ music, should be preparing something to debut for his showcase at the Proms at the end of the year. 

Something with cannons, Yakov tells him later, because Victor has become quite notorious for using those. “Not this… whatever this is you sent me,” his manager grumbles over the phone. 

“It’s called a lead sheet,” Victor explains cheerfully. “The basic melody is transcribed, but the chords are in the notations so that—“

“I know what a lead sheet is.” 

“—you can improvise and add along to it,” Victor finishes. He leans back into his chair, loose sheet music covering the worktable in front of him. They’re all scribbled on with various melodies. He’s planning to show them to Yuuri sometime soon, something to show him beyond the half-baked attempts at improvisation he’s managed so far whenever he and Yuuri are messing around on the keys together. But for now he’s sent a few unfinished ones to Yakov in an effort to appease his increasingly agitated inquiries about his progress. 

As if Yakov could ever be _appeased_. 

(Victor should know better by now.) 

“Listen, you want to experiment a little and over-complicate your already complicated process or whatever, fine,” Yakov says after a disbelieving sigh. Victor imagines him pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. “But this melody’s off and you need to arrange something for a professional _orchestra_ , not a middle school garage band. I expect something with a bit more substance from you next time I check in.”

“You mean a middle school jazz ensemble,” Victor says after a moment. “Middle school garage bands don’t have the tact to play from a lead sheet.” He pauses, then, “I’m still learning myself. And I’m, like. Victor Nikiforov.” 

Another sigh. “Substance!” Yakov barks, and then the line goes dead.

 

 

 

“What are we—oh! I’m sorry!” Yuuri peers down worriedly at the little girl he’s bumped into, but she seems unaffected by the light jostling he’d given her and continues to _ooh_ at the revolving spheres of metal hanging above them. Yuuri turns to Victor and tries again, “What are we doing here?” 

“Yakov says my piece is lacking substance,” Victor says, reaching down to grab Yuuri’s hand. “Let’s go this way.” He tugs them towards a direction mostly because it is the only one without any signs of a staff member giving a lecture on a microphone headset, with the little speakers hooked to the belts of their museum-regulated cargo pants. 

There are many things trousers can be, but they shouldn’t be _regulated_ and _cargo._ Definitely not _both at once,_ and when Victor and Yuuri pass by a poster that says, **_A BIG STEP FORWARD FOR MANKIND_** , Victor thinks to himself no. Not quite. 

“So we’re looking at…” Yuuri turns his head to read a sign as they pass by. “Atoms?” 

Victor opens his mouth to say something, then closes it, like he has a lot to say but isn’t actually sure how to say it. He settles on an uncertain, “Yes,” and stops them in front of an exhibit with deep blue lights shining on a life-sized atomic model and, inexplicably, nineties-era space-themed music pumping from the speakers overhead. 

He can feel Yuuri’s soft stare on him and contemplates elaborating a bit more, but then Yuuri’s hand is squeezing his and he’s able to let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. 

“S’what do you think?” Yuuri says, turning his gaze towards the exhibit. His fingers drum against the back of Victor’s hand in time with the music. 

“Kinda boring,” Victor decides. 

Yuuri gives a small laugh, breathy and through little exhales out of his nose, and nudges their shared hands towards the exhibit’s label. Their knuckles knock gently against the laminated paper. “You mean Bohr,” he says. “Bohr-ing.” 

“I…” Victor feels his mouth go dry while staring at how the corners of Yuuri’s eyes crinkle up, still laughing at his own joke. 

“What?” Yuuri looks up at him with a fading smile and scrunches up his nose. “No good?” He cocks his head at the exhibit, gestures at a passing electron. “Don’t be so negative.” 

Oh my god, Victor thinks. 

Perhaps, if Yakov is right—the operative words are _perhaps_ and _if_ —and Victor’s current music is lacking substance, it’s only due to failure on his part in properly conveying this thing that’s building up his chest and taking up mass. It weighs on him while he lets Yuuri tug them towards the next exhibit, presses on his heart like a sustain pedal. Victor should feel heavy, he realizes, but he feels light, and the synthesizer in his ears gives way to the soft, twinkling sounds of a piano. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> faziolis aren't actually that bad. they have... character, which a jazz pianist like yuuri would appreciate, but an elitist classical snob like victor would not. 
> 
> because victor is. super elitist and extra. (he has used *literal cannons* in his compositions omg hey V calm down, maybe???) 
> 
> (i work at a music school and this fic is an act in projecting my coworkers)
> 
> no music in this chapter but a duet is to come :) also, if victor had been put through proper music training in university, he definitely would have known what a lead sheet is etc but let's say he was put through a really conservative, traditional music education. let's just say that and be ok widdit


End file.
